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Dilemmas

January 20, 2011

I agree with David Denby, who, in his review this week in the magazine of “The Dilemma” (available to subscribers), writes that it’s “a mess, but it’s an affecting mess” that “veers wildly in tone within a given scene, going from slapstick to earnest self-revelation to hints of perversity and then back to comedy.” The director, Ron Howard, has got hold of a few wild beasts—starting with the script, and including the star, Vince Vaughn, and the frighteningly intense co-star Winona Ryder—that break free of his directorial decorum; it’s interesting to trace the movie’s ungainly contours.

It seems, at first, to be shaped like a romantic comedy: Vaughn’s Ronny wants to propose to his girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly), a successful chef, but Ronny’s business venture with his best friend, Nick (Kevin James), an automotive-design boutique, is on shaky footing, and he wants to hold off on the proposal until he gets word on a big contract that’s pending. When word is good, he seeks—with the odd, awkward charm of a man who doesn’t get women—the ideal setting in which to pop the question, and it’s while scouting out an arboretum that he spies Nick’s wife, Geneva (Ryder) in the arms of a studly young man (Channing Tatum). Now Nick has not one secret but two—his planned proposal and her infidelity—and he’d have trouble divulging the latter to Beth without spilling the beans on the former.

But another secret, one that emerges only belatedly from the fabric of the script, is actually its dark, defining pattern—the fact that Ronny is a gambling addict now in recovery. The subject of the movie is secrets, and, even though Ronny seems to have overcome his troubles, furtiveness is a long-ingrained habit, maybe even a defining trait of his character. It’s a dire and perceptive premise to build a comedy on, to trap an oversharing motormouth in the unspoken and unspeakable, and the movie’s edge of melodrama is due not just to the situation but to the characters—Ronny’s, and Geneva’s (and David rightly praises the writing as well as the performance of their scenes together).

The center of the movie, though, is Vince Vaughn, whose comic archetype is, of course, Jackie Gleason, or, rather, Ralph Kramden—the man with big ideas and big appetites that are both fed and constrained by his sense of monogamous romance, and that burst out as one kind of excess or another (in Ralph’s case, eating; in Ronny’s, gambling; and, as always in Vaughn’s, talking, or, rather, fabulation). The leavening dose of practicality delivered by wife or girlfriend, and their inevitable impractical transgressions, inevitably reduces these men to little boys being scolded by, in effect, their mother; they’re perpetually frustrated, swaggering, endearing, overgrown boys whose ideas and frustrations are the stuff of manhood—indeed, the stuff of mankind.

Yet, significantly, Vaughn’s persona is that of a bourgeois Kramden, and the class switch brings his characters more than money. Ralph Kramden is a bus driver whose big mouth does little but get him in trouble with his boss, Mr. Marshall; when he comes home, he takes his uniform off. Vaughn, however (as in “The Dilemma” and its prime predecessor, the superior “The Break-Up,” which both offer Sirk-style melodrama for post-adolescents), makes a living with his mouth: he is in quasi-liberal quasi-performance-centered jobs, he runs his own business, and, as a result, he is always on, his work comes home with him, and his private life goes to work with him. This is both the modern-age dream and, potentially, its nightmare; and this unified field of talent and character, of love and money (or passion and paycheck, as we heard in a recent independent film)—the convergence of person and performance, of role and life—makes Vaughn an exemplary actor of his times and an instinctive modernist, “a great actor,” as David writes, “longing for a great director.”

What’s missing from “The Dilemma,” and from Howard’s direction, is, mainly, the lack of a sense of becoming. Someone said that the key decision of a director is when to start a shot and when to end it. Howard’s decisions on the subject are poor ones: scenes start too late and end too soon, and few of them breathe—or let the actors breathe. And, given Vaughn’s inherent personal style—the style of a man who’s searching for what he thinks and feels, and negotiating how much of it he’s willing to reveal, by talking it through at a mile a minute (which makes him surprisingly similar to the kind of heuristic actors and nonactors we find in mumblecore movies)—he needs time to get up to speed and to cool down. And Howard has little sense of time, little interest in observing how the moments happen; the performances are cut down to Howard’s precise but generic sense of comic drama.

P.S. In “The Break-Up,” the director Peyton Reed gives Vaughn the needed breadth to work in (by way of the playing-out of scenes in a more loosely structured script). Reed also has the virtue of having cast, opposite Vaughn, an actress who is equally exemplary of her moment, Jennifer Aniston, the emblem of the smart and focussed career woman who wants it all, whose biological clock is ringing like the bells of Big Ben, and whose energized determination seems to be perpetually perched on the edge of tears.